


Amalgam

by Inchoatl



Category: Kidd Commander (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst is best cushioned by Fluff, Breakfast Shenanigans, Domestic, Gen, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28537671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inchoatl/pseuds/Inchoatl
Summary: One morning in the Sprawl.
Relationships: Agatha Goddard/Phineas Kidd, Lucky Noon & Phineas Kidd, Lucky Noon & Ulrich Weiss, Phineas Kidd & Ulrich Weiss, Toulouse Deforest/Ulrich Weiss, the usual suspects - Relationship
Kudos: 2





	Amalgam

Dawn calls to Mana. The sun pulls, and she pulls, and Phineas feels half her soul _reach out_. The Call of Kairos is anything but pleasant, but it's a good reminder that she's still here, they're still here, and their heading is still true. There's still a sun out there to chase.

Phineas stays still as she eases through the burn of sunrise, taking a further moment to reorient herself to Lucky Noon. It's much easier now that she's bound to them, but it's not yet instinctual the way grounding herself is instinctual. Sometimes she still reaches for the earth, and then all of a sudden she remembers just how high in the air she is on a potently visceral level. It's easy enough for her to find her feet again when that happens, but it hadn't always been that way.

Balance is a difficult thing to strike. It takes work. It takes constant work. It's not something kids are particularly good at, and they were both kids back then, her and Mana. Still are, really, but back then...

Phineas remembers speaking with too much light in her voice, and Mana with too little. Too big and too small, and it was all they could do just to keep from coming apart. That's how the biting had started. There was just too much pressure, all the time, outwards and inwards. Maybe if she made a hole, maybe the light would be able to get out, maybe she'd stop feeling more gas than person, maybe Mana would have more space.

So she bit, and the pressures didn't equalize because that's not how any of this worked, and she kept on biting because maybe she just needed to do it more, and it was something she could control, and the pain made her body feel real.

Feeling real was hard back then. _Feeling_ was hard back then.

It took a lot of time, and a lot of work, and a lot of running themselves emotionally ragged, but now Phineas can talk to people without commanding they obey on accident. She can even keep her commanding from leaking out when she's angry, or sad, or hurt, only the faintest of golden fractures edging her words, and hadn't that been a trick. She still remembers Gideon's smile, the first time she yelled at him in her own voice. It is a smile she keeps very close to her heart, next to his words.

' _You can't be messing with other peoples' choices, little rooster. Commanders' gotta be careful 'bout that. If you try and command all your problems away every time any little thing goes wrong, sooner or later you aren't gonna have any friends, any family. All you're gonna have is you and you and you, nothing but you staring out of every face you meet._ '

Phineas thinks of an empty cabin, and a lone compass. Of meals where the only sound is two sets of cutlery, working away. Of the memory of a man named Raven Slight.

Then she gets up and heads for breakfast.

Phineas wanders into the kitchen to see Ulrich peering dubiously into an eggcup. Ulrich is the ship's unofficial chef by dint of seniority and the fact that Phineas only really knows one recipe for gumbo, and that recipe is 'Everything goes in a pot and you leave it simmering for however long you've got.' The last time she'd tried, Ulrich had pronounced it inedible and loudly claimed that the only reason Phineas was capable of eating it was because she could cheat and simply command her body to Not Die of Food Poisoning. Phineas, equally loudly, proclaimed Ulrich to be a 'giant baby' and a 'prissy city boy' who couldn't handle proper country fair. 

Agatha had tried a spoonful of gumbo and announced “Ulrich should do all the cooking.” Phineas had sulked for days.

The only other person who cooks regularly is Lucky Noon, and they do it mostly as an offshoot of their primary hobby, ie. fucking with their silly humankinds. Everything they make is perfectly edible, they only use ingredients from the ship's stores, but...

“Congratulations,” Ulrich says mildly as he pushes the eggcup away and turns to the stove. “You seem to have achieved crunchy yogurt... Is that tamarind?”

“And paprika!” Noon says cheerfully from their perch on the galley's primary table, flower patterned legs kicking idly. “If you keep chewing enough, you should be able to make out the nutmeg.”

This suggestion is drowned out by Ulrich taking a loud mouthful of his morning tea.

“Awww, come on, don't be like that!” Noon whines. “Every mouthful is a journey! Do ya know how long it took me to get the consistency to go from smooth to crunchy to spongy? It took ages for me to figure it out!”

“That is a journey I will pass on, I think. I'm more of a homebody, really,” Ulrich says, as he starts pulling out the ingredients for pancakes. Phineas gets a nod in greeting as she steps forward to help. Jo might not have managed to wedge all that many recipes in between Phineas' ears, but years of living under the roof of a Take-No-Shit Walker means that she's at least practiced in pulling out ingredients and utensils and swirling a large spoon in a bowl of whatever needs mixing while the cooking happens. “Dare I ask why you spent so much time engineering a dish to be wrong in every conceivable way?”

Noon shrugs, impish, the same moment Phineas asks “Was it Gideon?” with only the barest of hitches in her voice. Noon blinks, surprised, and then suddenly they're gone.

“It's like living in a floating skeleton closet. No wonder I feel like I'm home,” Ulrich mutters, amusement dry as curing salt. He finishes measuring milk into flour and hands the entire mixing bowl over to Phineas along with a large wooden spoon. “Why do you think your, uh, Gideon would be interested in _that_?” He asks, nodding over at the eggcup where Noon's unholy concoction is still wafting out the scent of fresh honey like the world's most dumbest pitcher plant. Eat me, you'll regret it.

“He used to give Jo shit for cooking the same meal twice, and Jo'd say 'I ain't takin' shit from someone _I_ had to spend an entire fuckin' week patching up because he wanted to find out what lava tasted like!'” Phineas' imitation of the most intimidating medic Ulrich has ever encountered is eerily accurate, and he idly wonders how much use its gotten over the years. “I dunno. He just seemed to kinda want... And I didn't know then but, now...”

“I'm afraid you're going to have to finish those sentences if you want me to follow along, dear,” Ulrich smiles fondly as he pitched cubes of freshly sliced strawberry into the batter as Phineas stirs intently, mind elsewhere.

“Dunno. Kinda figured you get old enough, you start spending time lookin' for anything new's all.”

* * *

Breakfast is a casual affair, as most affairs on the Lucky Noon tend to be, no schedules save the ones that exist within the heads of their crew. That said, humankinds are creatures of habit, and patterns emerge even in the short amount of time that the crew has spent on Noon. Agatha is up before anyone else by pure dint of needing less sleep than her squishier counterparts. She and Noon generally have the space to themselves right through the pre-dawn up until Ulrich steps out to greet the sun. 

Phineas is something of a wild card, the time she gets up depending heavily on how the night previous went. Heavy drinking and/or fighting can lead to a lie in, but an early morning means spending time with Agatha out on deck in the pre-dawn dimness which is often an effective counterargument to lying in bed until her stomach demands she eat.

Toulouse is often the last to breakfast, though that's because he tends to get so engrossed with his work that he loses track of time. Ulrich's usually the one to hunt him down and remind him that he should probably put the pen down and pick up a fork instead, or at least get a fresh cup of tea for god's sake you're going to give yourself carpel tunnel how do you still have fingers?

Chronicler is not a job gentle on hand joints.

Phineas is on her third stack of pancakes by the time Ulrich is able to chivy Toulouse into the kitchen. Ulrich rolls his eyes and moves to the oven which has grown a couple extra elements in his absence, complete with extra pans and a Lucky Noon perched on a mismatched set of stools to flip them. They're in the form they generally associate with Phineas, short and brown-skinned, with a ridiculous straw hat perched on their head and an equally ridiculously overlarge Hawaiian T-shirt proclaiming them “The best thing since waves” drowning most of their upper body. Ulrich looks to the blueberry pancakes they're flipping dubiously.

“Phineas?”

“I mixed 'em. They're good,” she replies around a mouthful of pancake as she pushes a crusted bottle of maple syrup over to Agatha.

“I'm wounded!” Noon laughs as they flip a pancake onto Phineas-ravaged stack in the middle of the table. “It ain't my fault you can't handle a little adventure in your meals!”

“I already have more than enough adventure simply being on this crew,” Ulrich says as he grabs a fresh plate and waggles it enticingly under Toulouse's nose, mostly to break Toulouse's line of sight with the journal he iss currently writing in. Ulrich gets a stuttered 'Thank you' for his efforts, and he turns back to the stove where the fresh bowl of pancake mix and the remains of his first test pancakes wait for him.

“I was looking over some of the charts and old logbooks we got,” Toulouse says as he juggles eating, annotating and talking. From a brief glance, it looks like he's editing his entry on the bioluminescent ladybugs they had encountered the day previous, specifically on their ability to induce nausea by flashing their spots in tandem. The splotch at the edge of the page is _not_ soup.

“Yeah? Anything interesting?” Phineas asks, somewhat distracted by Agatha who is alternating between eating pancakes herself and feeding bits to Beaufort and Doldrum, a small smile plastered on the android's face the whole while.

“Grab bag,” Toulouse replies, now doubly distracted by breakfast and a pair of journals. “Plenty of logs on roaming glitch fields, aggressive colonies of flying medusae, and the occasional pollen fogbank, tohugh I think it's out of season for that last one. This one here's a report on a c-cloud whale sighting,” he says, tapping the journal he's reading quicklike, 'cloud whale' still lingering on his fingertips.

“Really!?” Phin asks excitedly, and it's little wonder. Cloud whales number among the various old wives tales that have come to make up most of Ulrich's day-to-day life. According to the stories, they were less an entity unto themselves and more of a floating eco-system, somewhat like a school of fish if the fish happened to be an assortment of cloud types from Cirrus to Cumulus and everything in between. Conveniently, this made them effectively impossible to capture or kill, and therefore their existence nigh impossible to verify.

They are, allegedly, breathtaking.

“Supposedly,” Toulouse says with a smile. “I, ah, I'm not sure how much I'd trust these logs, though. It's a copy of an old sky pirate logbook, and sky pirates tend to, ummm...”

“Embroider?” Ulrich offers as he tips fresh pancakes onto his own plate and sits at the table.

Toulouse nods.”Yes. They, uhhh, they like their stories. 'specially ones they can say they were part of.”

“Noon?” Phineas asks, and her question is punctuated by Lucky Noon hitting the bottom of the Triple Sized Caloric Constipation Big Gulp Slurpee™ they manifested for themself.

“Ain't impossible,” Noon says. “One or two been known to head out this far, but this side of the Sprawl's a bit too civilized fer 'em. Be nice to fly through one, though. Been a while since I did that.”

“Through one?” Agatha chimes in, a blip in her eye indicating she's wrapped up whatever web article on cloud whales she was reading. “The cryptid entry says they're often large, but...”

“Huge,” Noon says with a grin. “Big one could fit Decodenn in it easy like. Even the small ones we'd see a mile off. Though, hold that thought...” Noon pauses, their eyes flicking up for a moment beofre saying “Oh hey, ship off port side!”

There's a scramble as Phineas rushes out of the kitchen, Ulrich following swiftly after to do preemptive damage control. Toulouse grabs his pen and flips to a fresh page in his journal, following sedately after while Agatha bundles up pancake bits for Doldrum and Beaufort. There's a deafening 'Awooooga!' indicating Ulrich wasn't able to catch Phineas in time, and both Agatha and Toulouse exit the cabin in time to see one of the odder starships they'd come across turn slowly towards them.

It looks like an observatory if an observatory consulted a sea urchin regarding architectural design. Almost pill-shaped, it has two massive telescopes, one jutting out of each dome at the ship's top and bottom. The rest of it is utterly studded with further spyglasses of varying sizes, a floating panopticon, though the fact that it is slowly rotating towards them, bringing one of its huge telescopes to bear, indicates otherwise.

In the fading echo of the ship's whistle, Lucky Noon's words are especially loud.

“Somethin' ain't right.”


End file.
